This essay identifies eco-neurosis as an affective response to the environmental crisis. Aware that their lives contribute to this crisis, the eco-neurotic polices their consumption and lifestyle patterns, yet simultaneously remains attached to the good life promise under capitalism: a double bind that causes compulsive thoughts and feelings. If such eco-neurosis causes an affective displacement, this essay proposes the complaint as a genre that expresses such neurosis and offers the promise of renewed belonging. A reading of eco-neurosis in Jonathan Safran Foer's We Are the Weather (2019) and Jenny Offill's Weather (2020) shows how the complaint however preserves the double bind.
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